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As opposed to the US currently taking down any.com,.net or.org site they damn well please because you hurt some corporation's feelings? As someone that lives in Canada, I don't think the UN could do a whole lot worse.

>>>google is simply a company. companies are never there for your benefit. never.

I agree with the first sentence, because companies should not be worshipped like football teams. They are inaminate entities and nothing more. But disagree with the second. Companies ARE there to serve the customer and keep him/her happy, because it they don't they end-up like Montgomery Wards or Circuit Shitty (bankrupt).

I visited Wards during its final selloff. The employees there looked extremely depressed, and

Yes they are. I invest in companies, companies pay my salary, pay taxes, invest in research that improves lives. My retirement fund is filled with companies working on maximizing profit and I don't mind any of that, because it will make my retirement better.

Companies make things and provide services that I pay money for, because if I were to make those things or do those services, they are more expensive and not done as well.

No, Google is a magazine publishing a new edition every time you hit Search. The are paid by the ad agencies every time they place one in front of you, then more if you click on it, etc., whereas Time only gets paid for the column-inch of ads.

Seriously, telling users (who aren't customers, after all) what terms to avoid is about as far as Google can go, until they acquire their own nuclear arsenal and demonstrate a willingness to use it. The PRC is doing the censorship, not Google.

I would think that giving people interactive hints that can be used to work around censorship is generally 'not evil'. More evil than taking a stand and ignoring the Chinese government until they're completely blocked and replaced wholesale with a Chinese government controlled search engine? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Hw are they hiding it? They're blatantly pointing out that users shouldn't use terms least they be disconnected or run into censorship, even for common things that they might not have thought of before. Now youll probably get a warning for something when you weren't even remotely looking for something subversive.

It's not Google doing the censoring. Apparently China interferes somehow with connections that are caught searching for various terms. Google now highlights certain words and pops up a notice that it has observed these words may break your connection.

Responding to complaints from Chinese Googlers that the search engine is 'inconsistent and unreliable,' Google has updated its service to help users steer clear of search queries that will result in page errors. Google will now highlight characters and phrases that are likely to 'break' a user's connection.

My reading of that is that Google is being censored, not that Google is censoring as otherwise not a word in it makes sense.

If Google were censoring, then the search engine would work normally, it's just certain search results would not appear. So a search for "Tienanmen Square Massacre" would come up with pages of results of, say, Fred Tienanmen's blog entry where he massacres those proposing that squares have the same sized sides, but would be absent anything about some funny business that occurred in China during the 1980s.

That's not what's happening though. What TFS is saying is that users are suffering random page errors, that the engine feels "inconsistent and unreliable". That's consistent with a third party, say, perhaps, the Great Firewall of China, interrupting page downloads as they happen because they have naughty words on them.

Google will now highlight characters and phrases that are likely to 'break' a user's connection.

Uh so it looks like Google is calling attention to China's censorship and giving users a nod ahead of time that their search is going to be censored. This is far from "hiding" anything and, conversely, lets the user know about the censorship. The other good thing this does is that if I'm interested in censored terms and my IP hits the great firewall with these censored terms, the government might build a dossier on my entire histories to see what else I'm interested in and have dirt on me if they need it. But if Google is warning me ahead of time, this never hits the firewall and China doesn't get to profile their citizens based on search queries. Google will enable you, if you so choose, to appear to keep your nose clean.

Unless the list of ALL the words are transferred to ALL the users so the logic occurs entirely in a JS and nothing is transferred out, I agree. This sounds stupid. I doubt the Great Firewall will allow this list to be distributed.

Except it's not a SECURITY issue, it's simply a way to mask words in a way that would over-tax their firewall were it to attempt filtering them (especially if salted). MD5 may be broken, but it still takes a HELL of a lot longer to scan a thousand MD5 hashed value than plaintext.

Google is empowering the Chinese citizen with knowledge that he/she is actively being censored. Previously, it was all mysterious rumors. I mean, they know there's censorship, but without defined boundaries. That aspect of being unknown invokes fear. Fear is control. What Google is doing is providing solidification to that fact. As I've said earlier, this will backfire can cause Google to be kicked out.

The Chinese government is a lot like that mysterious "Architect" in the movie The Matrix. They want to control without being the source of instability. By making censorship an actively known issue, they've become a major fly in the ointment. The government will not have this. I guarantee!

sure, they help you avoid the chinese knowing what you are searching for. but you still can't search for it!

Why do people run their mouths when they have no idea what they are talking about? As can be plainly seen in this screenshot [blogcdn.com], it is quite clear that you can search for it by simply clicking the "search anyway" link. Google is just being helpful and letting you know that you are probably going to not be able to get much of a response and it is out of their control.

Google is not removing results from their search. A user comes along and searches for "Human Rights Abuses in Tibet" for example. If I run the search I get about 4.5 million hits (my lord, 4.5 million hits on that? Anyway...) because i'm in the US.

If I were in china, i'd get a 404 page not found error, or some other weird obsure error page.

Whats happening is someone between me and Google is intercepting the search query, deciding on some filter if what im searching for is appropriate based on some unknown list of "not to be known" subjects, and if my searches dont pass the test I dont get the results back. Peoplere were complaining to Google because it seemed like it was Google's fault.

So Google is now going to turn around and say "Hey, you, user. Yeah you! Just wanna let you know, searching for that has resulted in people not getting results."

So, yeah, way to jump on the "OMG GOOGLE IS EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL AND IM SMART FOR POINTING IT OUT HAHAHAHAHAHA" bandwagon. Your bias is showing.

He said it: stop the business in China altogether. That'll show 'em chinese oppressors, they'll suffer! Because chinese overlords really need Google, and it's not like there's any other search engines in China [baidu.com] where people will flock despite it being censored as well.

Oh, I know, if Google's gonna not just talk the talk about not being evil, they should walk the walk, create a mercenary army and overthrow chinese government.

(On a side note, $any_corporation_name + mercenary army capable of overthrowing gover

Uh so it looks like Google is calling attention to China's censorship and giving users a nod ahead of time that their search is going to be censored.

Except they oh so carefully avoid any mention of the censorship or the cause for the connection breaking, instead implying that the search terms themselves are breaking the connection. They go out of their way to make this seem like a technical glitch rather than what it is, so I'd say they're very much not calling attention to censorship.

I understand perfectly fine, what you've misunderstood is my point. I'm not arguing that Google is doing something wrong here, but that eldavojohn's assertion that Google is calling attention to censorship and all that is false. Google is just trying to provide their users with a better user experience.

Google is doing the clever thing by using very carefully worded language which makes it abundantly clear what's going on to anybody with any clue at all (and Chinese net users certainly have a clue about this sort of thing), without stating so explicitly.

If they did as you suggest, and explicitly mentioned censorship, they'd immediately get stomped on by the Chinese government.

Google is not hiding, nor aiding China's censorship. In a way... Google is actually "highlighting" China's censorship. Google is a company that wants to keep its customers. It's customers think that Google is to blame for what they can't find (at least from what I understand about the article) and so Google is trying to make it clear that certain things they look for will not work, since their Government doesn't trust them. To those who grasp this concept, every time a word they type in the query box gets highlighted its like Google saying "sorry, your Government doesn't want you to know about that". Whether Google has any other motive than just making it clear that they are not to blame for failed searches or not, the result in the minds of the observant is still worth noting.

I don't think you have followed this issue.
Google initially followed some of China's requests but then stopped, closed up shop in China and redirected requests to its HK site that is not censored.. Now the Chinese government is using it's firewall to block (censor) google searches to that site. Google is not censoring at all. And the government of China is making google look unreliable to it's customers who are seeing disconnects.

Until the Chinese public rejects the idea that their exploitation is for the "common good" they'll continue to be a 2nd rate country.The moment the Chinese realize that they deserve the basic rights granted in western countries they'll become unstoppable. I don't care if they've got a thousands year old culture. It's wrong. Right now they simply don't value their own rights an freedoms and they'll remain oppressed if they don't want to help themselves.

I'd like to see this feature rolled out in every country. There are very few countries that aren't busy censoring something; Whether it's the copywrongers or some anti-terror legislation, or the latest "Save the children" law, Google receives piles of censorship demands weekly from every government. We can't just say "Shame on China!" when everyone else is doing variations on the same theme.

In Germany you often get a little notice at the bottom of the results if something has been filtered because of our censorship laws (mostly fro-teh-children bullshit). It would be nice if it was more obvious and more specific though. At least they link to chillingeffects.org, where you can compare local search results to "global" search results.

I applaud Google for this. But unfortunately Google might actually get banned for this. After all, they have Baidu to pick up the slack anyways (and they WILL roll over unlike Google). Google will be viewed as "inharmonious" to Chinese society. A harmonious society is an old Confucius concept that's been the new mantra of the PRC as of late. Which is ironic being that the Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge both Confucius and capitalistic ideology. But I digress.

It's actually older than Confucius, including the bit about the state getting to define what is and is not "harmonious." Needless to say, it has been popular with the various rulers of China ever since.

Has anyone got any good articles, documentaries, or personal experiences about what ordinary Internet use is like in the PRC? Does filtering or censorship show up as a brick wall "COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CONTENT FORBIDDEN", or a passive "sorry, no such content found"? How often does it affect ordinary daily browsing? If ordinary browsers are aware of it, do they generally develop a seething resentment of it, or a shrug-and-live-with-it accpetance (or resignation) like some western employees whose workplaces fi

I was in China last week, and tried to go to Facebook (which is a blocked site in China). I don't remember the specific error, but it was something along the lines of "server not responding". It didn't tell me it was blocked or chide me for looking or anything like that.

That reminded me that I was behind the great firewall, so I didn't go looking for any other questionable content, and I was unaware of anything else getting blocked/filtered in the time I was there.

I live and work in China.The standard Great Firewall error is displayed as "Connection Reset" in Firefox.

There are two (commonly known) sets of blocking. A lengthy list of domains that never work, and content scanning temporary blocks.The scanning works on both outgoing and incoming traffic, and once triggered for a domain will block that domain in its entirety for a given user/connection for between 5 and 30 minutes.

In essence if you search for something using the key words then you get a connection reset

The search can still be performed, but it is China — NOT Google — that is doing the censoring by interfering with queries which contain offending terms.

Before, if someone in mainland China performed a search containing an offending term, equipment that is part of the so-called "Great Firewall" would interfere with the search, making it appear that the search results page was unavailable or resetting the browser's connection, and then making Google unava

You can still do the search by hitting "Search Anyway". Anywhere other than mainland China, this search will work. Just try it. If you're in mainland China and you elect to search anyway, that will result in your connection being reset and will temporarily break your ability to interact with Google. It is China, not Google, that is doing this.

Wow, that "Search anyways" button is REALLY hard to find, I can see how hard that must be for you.
The issue is that if you run that search from inside China, your access to Google gets blocked for around a minute. To try to help explain why to users, they pop that message up.

and it's google blocking it, since I'm in the states unlike their blog where they make it sound like it's china blocking before the search gets to them, which is untrue.

Uhm, what? Do you even read what you post and do you even read the fine summary? It clearly says "We've observed that searching for [] in mainland China may temporarily break your connection to Google. This interruption is outside Google's control.... Search anywyas". You can click that "Search anyways" and get your results without any bans, blocks and network timeouts, given you're not in mainland China, where you'd presumably get connection dropped after trying to Search anyways.

A lot of people are having trouble with this article because Google is having to do very Political things in this case.

Google engineers know for damn sure why the connections are being reset. But if they say that explicitly, the Chinese government will rambunctiously cuddle them. Google has already had troubles in the past with the Chinese government. So, what google has done here is said, "Oh no, there's something out of our control. If you do this search then your connection will be reset."

By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China,' the company said in a blog post.

ZOMG the list of censored terms has to be bigger than War and Peace. Here's an idea, throw all of those terms at the great firewall and buffer overflow results (or something like that). Then the Chinese people can see what the nanny state has been hideing from them. Information IS power.

Google should tell China to go fuck itself. The owners and employees should be ashamed. They should realize that the free and open sharing of information, something they have enabled for years, was itself enabled by societies that value freedom of both the written and spoken word. Now they are just another evil coward corporation that can't stomach the thought of reduced profits even if it means kissing the ass of one of the most free speech repressing countries in the world.